After a month of MOOC -ing I thought it was a good time to share some initial thoughts about the experience.

These are crude, simple, initial reactions that are not intended to be some deep insight into the content or platform. That said, Initial impressions matter. So here goes:

1) There are four rough categories of people taking the classes – aspiring MBAs who don’t want to pay for a degree or care about the diploma (I consider myself in this category); retirees or similar who enjoy a good dose of continued learning (e.g. Fun with World Music) but without the costly university fee; high schoolers who want an edge on college (this is comically made evident by posts about how FaceBook is overrated because of over-sharing of pictures of various HS activities), especially with interests in computer science and data science; and international students (many from developing nations) reaching out for “better” higher education in the absence of other options.

2) The universities and professors are overtly advertising themselves - How many mentions of your book and offerings at university can you cram into 20 minutes? How many times can you make it feel like this course is just the “tip of the glacier”? What this really tells me is that the profs and universities are after branding and marketing. They followed the textbook in “avoiding disruption” by jumping in with the newbies, but did it without the quality (more on this later). While the advertising gimmick is true to some degree in regular university classes (many profs require you buy their book – this class it’s “optional”), there’s a lot more of that happening here.

3) The technology sucks – Let’s call a spade a spade. Coursera’s main website is sleek and easily navigable, but the course pages themselves are little more than wikipedia articles on low-dose carotene regimens. 4 clicks just to get to the first week’s assignments. I’d love to see several improvements:

• Course twitter feeds/dedicated hash tags so folks can share articles or convos they see back to the class platform to enrich the discussion and content
• Mini-groups and communities within the course (and across Coursera) to promote building of stronger relationships between participants
• Stronger blog engines with active filters and keyword alerts just to clue you in if your incredibly insightful post about how Facebook isn’t innovative anymore because it’s just pictures of babies might have been posted already before you press “submit”
• Recommendation engines (like what you see in most social business platforms like Jive, SocialText, Connections) to help you find students that share your interests, fields of study, what you write (e.g. keywords), who’s “trending”, or other things Coursera can dream up. They’ve obviously got a lot of data
• Profiles that leverage open APIs so we don’t have to create another profile
• Better interaction/engagement with the lectures – not sure what that means, but figure it out
• Rate students. We’re not all equal; we’re not all above average. Want to hold people accountable, use some basic principles of gamification to show who’s contributing really valuable content, doing well in the class, maybe even has some level of “credibility” in the real world (pull from their LinkedIn profile). It’s not elitist, it helps make people accountable for what they say and encourage people to contribute quality content, not just noise.
• Some sort of “live” help or discussion one-on-one or in small groups with real students in the class, TAs, or other ways of enriching the discussion

4) Quantity over Quality - There’s a lot of potential, but they should be further than they are. Coursera has grown enormously quickly. But right now, the focus has been quantity and not quality. They need to fix that or face rapid drop off and disruption.

Read what some of my other MOOC-ers are saying.

I’m fortunate to have two awesome former colleagues join me in the MOOC journey. After the first week’s assignments, here’s what MacKenzie had to say about it (re-posted with permission):